


In All Your Life

by convivialGrimace



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Blood, Depression, F/M, Post-Apocalypse, Sadstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-09
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 17:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/588079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/convivialGrimace/pseuds/convivialGrimace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Strider, for once in his life, is alone in the aftermath of the end of the world. What else is there to do but reflect?</p>
            </blockquote>





	In All Your Life

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fanfiction originally for myself, but I finished it up for Tumblr user innocuousequius.

Your name is Dave Strider, and you are looking at a broken city, littered with the trash of what used to be urban Texas.

 

 

 

Earlier, you went scoping out the damage. The roads are littered with abandoned waste. Water bottles with the labels clumsily peeled off. A dirty, frayed striped scarf. Crumpled newspapers from last week. The byproducts of human civilization.

The wide Southern skies, once so blue and beautiful, are now cursed with a bitter tinge of orange from the smog. You can’t tell what time of day it is anymore. You don’t need to. The wind occasionally brushes against your skin. There is no comfort in it. It is only cold that you are not accustomed to.

The satellite receiver beside you looks rusted and dead. It still swings to and fro as if it were being pushed around by the wind. The other receptors on the rooftops close by yours are the same. Each and every building is straight and tall, thrusting into the barren skies as if to declare that it’s still standing, despite the rubble and wreckage surrounding it.

Beneath your childishly swinging feet, an empty highway stands.

There’s an eerie silence.

(In all your life, you’d never heard such a perfect silence. Something was always around to break it, whether it was a rushing car, a sudden humming of the air conditioning, or just the sound of your own breathing in a small room.)

 

 

 

Humanity’s extinction was a sort of bittersweet moment, you muse as you pace around your apartment. Ben Stiller was a great guy, but you think that ultimately, there was only empty sentiment when he gave you his shades, and ironic sincerity when you refused to take them off.

People were like that. It was hard to find someone who cares.

Only one person saw through your act of apathy, your defense mechanism against the shittiness of the world, and she’s the only one person you considered a friend. It’d be great to talk to her now, even if she would keep on picking at your brain. God knows she’d be up for it.

Hell, maybe one day, she’ll send a message. That she’s survived. That she’s okay. That somehow, the two of you made it through the end of the world as you witnessed it. That you, as a duo, survived the day that you were thrust into airless space, into the blistering fire of a mud sun, and came out as lone gods.

Together.

“But probably not,” you mutter to yourself, breaking the timeless spell the quiet city had cast on you. The sensation of complete and utter void hits you like a brick. Thinking is a construct of sanity, and sanity is useless in a place like this. You sigh.

Only coldness where your heart used to be.

No sympathy for the dead.

No empathy for the fallen.

 

 

 

You remember meeting Rose Lalonde online as a kid.

Neither of you had parents, having been emancipated at a ridiculously young age and left to raise yourselves. It was up to you to get yourself fed, and clothed, and educated. You have no idea how you learned to speak or to walk, because nobody was around to help you out. Life up to age twelve is nothing short of a blur.

You get the feeling that it’s probably the same ordeal for Rose, though you can’t explain the train of thought that lead to this. Maybe it's the familiarity you share with her, the kind that made you trust her like a favorite sister. Maybe it's the comfort, the comfort that made you so susceptible to opening up your stoic outer shell. Or maybe, it's the tipping point.

The tipping point that made you fall in love with her.

One of your most memorable moments, from before the end of the world, was joking that you had been weaning yourself off of Washington apple juice until you were five. You couldn't help yourself, really - water didn't taste right in your mouth, and apple juice has a lot of health benefits. Including possessing a good amount of Vitamin C, lacking in things like sodium and fats, and tasting like the lactations of a thousand euphoria gods. Unfortunately, when you brought up the latter point, Rose started teasing you about your homoerotic affiliations with the beverage, and it kept up until…

Even with Rose’s constant prodding, it only came to you that you should at least _try_  drinking water (proclaimed “completely heterosexual in nature” by the lady herself) after turning thirteen years of age. Your plumbing had stopped up, and you weren't feeling keen on making a complaint to your landlord. Empty cans of AJ soon proved saviors to your bladder, and a quick mishap made you realize that you could have pissed in your own apple juice without even knowing. Before long, you were waxing poetic about the products of Howie Mandel's bladder, and by the time you were done freaking out, the plumbing got fixed and you’d promised yourself never to drink another swig of apple juice for the rest of your life.

Which is convenient, because you promptly forgot your promise a few days later and continued to drink apple juice every day of your life. Not a single bottle was tainted, and your fears were revealed to be totally stupid.

You never told Rose a word of this. You knew that, as great a friend as she is, she’d never give you any personal space ever again.

Story of your life.

 

 

 

You realize that you may be a little harsh on Rose. You’d never dare call her a friend to her face, even in this apocalypse. But that's the thing. You think she knows, anyway.

This has all been said before.

 

 

 

Sometimes, you like to go for a walk in the barren wasteland you once called Austin, Texas. There’s no sign of intelligent life in the overturned streets. The traffic lights still light up sometimes, even if there technically shouldn't be power anymore. You have to put them out manually if you want to live without being taunted by that particular set of bulbs.

While you do have to look out for the drones every once in a while, you haven’t had any unpleasant encounters with them yet. They'll whiz by you a few times, not even noticing that you're there. You're pretty sure that you'll be able to evade them if they decide to wise up, just by flashstepping so fast their sensors can't detect you. It's not a difficult feat. The Batterwitch probably isn't even trying.

You can't wait for oblivion to hit you like a brick.

 

 

 

Sitting in your closet, alongside your apple juice and your forty-one outfits, is an unusual gizmo. You found it somewhere in the ruins, still viable albeit broken. It didn’t take much to get it back in working order, and you’re not even particularly adept at this sort of thing. It’s amazing that the drones didn’t get to it first.

What it looks like is a window. It’s got four panes and it was a pain in the ass to fix. You recall that before Crockercorp crushed Skaianet in its crooked talons, there was something reported in the news about a fenestrated plane. Hell, you still saw reviews of it in the shitty, smeared-up newspapers humanity left behind. Maybe it was a Skaianet invention. You don’t actually give a shit. You’ve got no idea what the word fenestrated plane means, so you expected nothing more than another piece of  _suis generis_ debris left behind.

You were wrong. All you did was plug it into the wall, connected it to the power grid which hadn't died the way it should've, let goddamn sparks fly like the swiftest of winged pigs. And through the thick glass, you saw something truly amazing.

 

 

 

You can't understand why it worked at all.

What the window showed was still ruins. Everything must be ruins by now: that much was clear. The important thing is that these weren’t _your_ ruins. The waste wasn’t your waste, considering the severe lack of label-less bottles. That sky wasn’t your sky, not when this many clouds were out.

You didn’t have much clue regarding whose place this was, but the glimmer of hope in your eyes was unmistakable.

Whenever you set aside some time for yourself amid the wandering, the pondering, and the self-pity, you watched the window. Some days, the only movement came from a heavy rain. Others, it was still and silent, not even a wisp of cloud daring to peek out from the broken skies. Even throughout these bleak periods, you watched, fervent with anticipation. It didn’t matter if you were wasting time. Time was meaningless when you had all the time in the world.

 

 

 

The results of your walks are always the same. You always find trash, waste, the byproducts of human civilization. And they are always illuminated by shitty, vaguely orange lighting.

You find water bottles with the labels clumsily peeled off like the sucker who did it didn’t even stop to consider that maybe they’re tearing it all wrong and a dirty frayed scarf that just makes you tut your head in shame since you know that you’d treat your clothing much better than the previous owner did and crumpled newspapers from last week that are wrinkled and smudged in every way to the point where you can’t even read about how your shitty movies did right before the apocalypse.

What you never find is a body. Or even the remains of one. You cannot explain why Texas is littered with trash, and not dead people.

You have a theory that the drones have been disposing of the bodies somehow, maybe dumping them into corpse landfills or something of the sort. But you've never seen those landfills, and never heard of them, and you think you're never going to be ready to prove your theory right. You're also half-confident that they could be burning them as fuel sources, to help power the drones, or the ships, or the alien technology in general.

You wonder if Rose would have any better ideas.

The wind tickles your cheek, as if playing along with your thoughts, but it offers you no solace. The only comfort you have now is that you won’t have to stare Death in his cold, dark eyes. They reflect nothing but miles upon miles of corpses.

 

 

 

She was alive.

She was not dead. She was alive, oh so very much alive, she was vivacious and moving and living and breathing and  _alive_.

You had been watching impatiently for several weeks. You couldn’t believe your eyes at first. It can’t be real. The fenestrated plane was fucking with you. You were getting so desperate, you were starting to see things. You mistook an imperial drone for her. Don’t be ridiculous, Strider.

But then you saw it again. It was a flash of white, not red. A woman in a tattered dress and heels peered out from the corner, and calmly walked away. It had to be her. Nobody else you know would survive what you survived.

“If it isn’t Rose Lalonde,” you muttered in disbelief.

 

 

 

After that, you didn't see her again. Not in that plane.

It had been a week since the sighting. You don't know why your nerves snapped so suddenly; how they had managed to get so tense over time. You should have just let it go; be the stony-faced, uncaring coolkid you trained yourself to become. But you were shaking the fenestrated plane in anger, cursing and shouting at it to show you Rose, show me Rose, she’s alive, oh god, don’t let this be the only time I ever see her again.

You'd punched the screen.

Then you threw it into the wall.

All pretenses of tranquility were smashed like a broken beer bottle. You banged your head against it until you were bleeding, red smearing the screen, as if a sacrifice might make your emotions bleed into the panes, or make her understand, or bring you two together. You were crying because you thought, for a second, that you might not have to die alone.

(Red. Your favorite color; a synonym, a euphemism, for blood. This was the only blood you’d seen all year, and how red, red, _red_ it was! All because of Rose Lalonde. You bled for the woman, she made your vision go red, where was that Rose Lalonde, why wasn’t she...)

 

 

 

After a while, you calmed down, you picked the pieces of glass out of your torn-up arms, you wiped the paint-like substance off your forehead, and you smeared it on your cheeks so you could dry your tears.

She didn’t hear a word. She didn’t hear your breathy cursing, your rage-addled bargaining, your desperate cries. She didn’t see your tears fall on the screen. She didn’t feel your pain. She couldn’t. It was, after all, only a screen.

You could never reach her. You would never have the pleasure of touching her face. You would never give her a reunion hug and a reunion quip, and she would never hug back and never retort with a psychoanalytical  _obiter dictum_  to counter. She would never take off your shades and never give you an uncharacteristically sheepish grin. You would never slick back your hair anxiously and never tell her, rather uncharacteristically, that you missed her and her snarky bullshit. She would never kiss you on the cheek and never tell you that that’s the only time you’ve ever told her the flat-out truth and never say that it’s the best thing she’s ever heard. You'd never tell her that you love her so much, it hurt so much, and now you're not alone, and it hurts but at least you have her. And most importantly, you would never see her again for as long as you lived.

Because how could you leave Texas? You’re not up for the challenge of being a hero and facing death. Not even for love. Not even to save your soul. And how could she leave New York, when she’s likely the same as you?

Even now, you can hear her say, "Wasting time is meaningless, even if you have all the time in the world."

This has all been said before.

 

 

 

In the end, you sat there and cried your heart out.

You hated it, but there was little else to do. For days, you sobbed and whimpered and sniffled and did the weakest thing you’ve ever done. You hated yourself more viciously and fiercely than you'd ever hated the drones, ever hated the Batterwitch, ever hated the whole situation that your children would be forced to inherit from you, if you even found anyone to make them with.

You let your liquid shame stain your grimy shirt, and you lamented the loss of the tolerance you never had. Because you were never as strong as Rose. She is so much stronger than you, and you couldn't help but feel like you failed her by surviving without anything to show for it.

Through your own tears, you saw something terrifying.

You gave up, but you shielded yourself. You cried, but your core became impenetrable. You swore to never, ever let yourself die by anyone's hands, never to let her down, because that was the least you could do. In time, you became the strongest person you ever knew. For the first time in your life, you had a philosophy of your very own. A path in life for you to follow.

With each repetition, you felt your numbness take over still more, and drown your sorrows still further.

"Only coldness where your heart used to be.

No sympathy for the dead.

No empathy for the fallen."

 

 

 

Your name is Dave Strider, and you are looking at a broken city, littered with the trash of what used to be urban Texas. It fits you perfectly, because you are a broken man, littered with the trash of what used to be the bitter remnants of your identity. You have not yet come to terms with the fact that you are going to die alone.

The only comfort you have now is that you won’t have to stare Death in his cold, dark eyes. They reflect nothing but miles upon miles of corpses.

It is eerily silent.

(In all your life, you’d never heard such a perfect silence. Something was always around to break it, whether it was a rushing car, a sudden humming of the air conditioning, or just the sound of your own breathing in a small room.)


End file.
